Mary Magdalene and Delphi

In week 9 of my Magdalene Myrrhophore Mysteries course, our journey is with the Pythia oracular priestesses of Delphi. When I was creating the course, I had a really strong feeling that Delphi is connected with Mary Magdalene. I have subsequently discovered that Judith Kusel, described in her book ‘France’, feels that same connection between the mystery schools, and that Mary Magdalene initiated at Delphi. 

Of course, I previously knew about the Cathar prophecy about the laurel, but I had not connected this with bay laurel. I had been thinking about the ornamental laurel that some of us having our gardens; but I feel quite foolish now to not have connected the words of the Cathar prophecy with the tree of the oracular priestesses.

The title of Rivera’s book ‘The Laurel Turns Green’ is inspired by a quote uttered by Cathar parfait martyr, Guilhem Belibaste, one of the last of the heretics to be burnt at the stake in 1321 by the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church. According to Yuri Stoyanov in The Other God: Dualist Religions from Antiquity to the Cathar Heresy, Guilhem Belibaste was betrayed by the Inquisition when he was enticed to return to enemy strongholds in Languedoc, France. Right when he was about to burn alive, supposedly Belibaste uttered: “We (the good people) shall return in 700 years when the laurel turns green again.” If you add up 700 from 1321, it equals 2021—the year supposedly the spirit of the Cathars was set to return. The subsequent religious persecution and wholesale extermination of millions of Cathars and their heresies is what led to the later witch hunts.

Rivera goes on to talk about the wearing of the laurel leaf crown by Julius Caesar and archangel Uriel (as depicted on his book cover) - but in his tracing of the laurel through that patriarchal lineage, I think he’s (pun intended) barking up the wrong tree here.

For me personally, and in the context of researching the myrrhophore lineage, Rigolioso has more engaging things to say about the laurel connection:

In preparation for her conception of Mary, which Rigolioso proposes was in the tradition of the parthenogenetic Divine birth Priestesses, Anne washes herself which which was part of the sacred preparation for Sacred sexuality and Divine birth rituals going back to Sumerian times; the ‘Birth of Mary’ [Protevangelion of James] Gospel describes Anne as putting on her wedding dress, again indicating that she is preparing for a sacred marriage ritual.

Joachim, husband of Anne, is described as being in the wilderness at this time. Since we know there is no male partner with Anne now because she is described as being alone with herself, she is entering an inner sacred marriage, preparation for parthenogenesis, divine conception that requires a tantric state of inner union.

The ritual continues with Anne going to her garden to take a walk. The location of Anne's ritual, her garden, is a sacred place, the garden in mystical tradition being a place of magical transformation. The garden metaphor can be traced back to the garden of the gods of the Sumerians, and the Garden of Eden of the Hebrews, realms where humans were thought to be easily in contact with the Divine. Furthermore, in Greece we have the Garden of the Hesperides, guarded by serpents, which was a place related to divine birth in particular. 

The Hesperides (depicted by Burne-Jones above), are the nymphs of evening and golden light of sunsets. We see the reference to nymphs again and again in the priestesshoods of Artemis and other ancient Greek traditions, meaning a combination of human woman, priestess, nature or star spirit and semi or fully divine being. Rigoglioso goes as far as to say that this combination of traits implies a connection with the divine birth priestesshoods.

The mystical connection between gardens and divine birth continues later in John 20:15, where Mary Magdalene perceives Jesus seen as a gardener at the tomb after his crucifixion and before he has fully resurrected.

Continuing with Anne: she sits in her special garden under a laurel tree. This was so significant in the ancient world at the time of Anne, as laurel was famously the centrepiece of the great oracular pilgrimage site of Delphi. We know the dramatic legend of Daphne, oracular Priestess who was present during the transition when men took the site away from women, shape-shifting into a laurel tree to escape sexual pursuit by the god Apollo, and the tree subsequently bore her name, Daphne meaning laurel.

There is plentiful evidence that the priestesses of Delphi were not only oracles, they were also holy women initiated in the practice of divine birth. We can therefore understand Daphne's story to be the case of a woman who chose to change form (or even perhaps die) rather than have her virgin-birth rite interrupted by a male god. 

The laurel may have been the signature tree at Delphi specifically because in the ancient world chewing its leaves was a known means of expanding one's consciousness. We know that priestesses used various medicines to achieve the trance state necessary both for delivering prophecy and conceiving children through divine means. Another important piece here is that ancient references to "sleep" and drowsiness" are signs that a priestess had entered into a trance induced by these powerful medicines for just such purposes.

Therefore, we can interpret Anne's "resting under the laurel tree” as a veiled clue that she is entering an altered state of consciousness, presumably by means of chewing its leaves. This places her very clearly in the lineage of divine-birth prophetesses.

At this point, Anne makes a praver that we can understand to be a ritual invocation to set the stage for what she is about to do. She asks the divine realms for the same blessing that was bestowed on Sarah when she divinely conceived Isaac. Anne is therefore placing herself in the ancient tradition of parthenogenetic priestesses reaching back to Sarah and on to her daughter Mary, and in the reference to Laurel, we see the connection between the lineage of Anne and Sarah and the Hebrew divine birth priestesses reaching through mother Mary and Mary Magdalene, and the oracular priestesses of Greece. If indeed Mary Magdalene was an initiate of Delphi then she would indeed have carried the bay laurel, at least metaphorically if not physically, through her ministries.